10 blogs your newspaper needs to rip off

I’m making a short list of frequently updated news blogs published by mainstream news organizations that post breaking news and link out to other sources.

If you run a newspaper.com and you don’t have a blog like this to put together links and short updates, ask yourself why not.

These are all great examples of blogs that get news up in a timely way without a great deal of waiting around for a daily-print-cycle-based editorial process to wrap up.

The Lede – New York Times – Notes on the news in the Times and all over the place. Links to blogs, other news sources, YouTube videos embedded on the page, etc. See also: City Room for the local NYC version.

Blotter – ABC News – “Brian Ross and the Investigative Team” provide lots of detail on current news stories. Not much in the way of links, but there’s lots more here than you’d find on the nightly newscast.

On Deadline – USA Today – Breaking news, including frequent updates on whatever’s breaking right now this minute, plus links to outside sources.

The Trail – Washington Post – Campaign trail notes from WaPo staffers. Less links and more reporting, but short and sweet for the most part, far ahead of the print cycle.

TechBlog – Houston Chronicle – OK, so this is more topical than timely, but Dwight Silverman is probably the most prolific individual newspaper blogger out there, with really frequent updates and lots of links, focusing on consumer technology, not venture capital news that no one outside of Silicon Valley cares much about.

Feel free to add more examples in the comments.

I’m looking for the best news linkblogs out there to use as examples of what a newspaper.com should be doing with an all-purpose breaking news blog or a topical linkblog.

How about a small, very focused blog? Smaller papers might do better to try those rather than a sweeping “blog about politics”. So here is mine:

http://www.granitegeek.org – GraniteGeek “Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire.”
(how do you make hot links in these comments?)

It’s an offshoot of my weekly science column, more of a story tracker than a commentary blog. I’m happy when daily page views hit 200, so even after a year it’s dinky – but it brought in a few hundred bucks from GoogleAdwords last year. And it’s fun.

Here’s a somewhat unpolished effort to aggregate local bloggers, but it might suggest some ideas that local newspapers can try. Outside blogging groups had done things like this in various places, but not too many newspapers have gone this way.

We have a growing little family of newsblogs on our site. Great tools for speedy news reporting, from the field or anywhere. (Actually, I’m often editing them from my commuter train.)
These are edited (gasp!) blogs. We’ll be starting another family of more personal single-author blogs.
Tom